Protect the Pope: double standards, Part 3

High Mass in the Extraordinary Form, at the LMS Priest Training Conference,

Belmont Abbey.

I explained in my last post the sorts of things even quite conservative bishops, religious superiors, and curial officials might say to explain why grass-roots conservative activism worries them, even as they cheerfully tolerate the likes of Basil Loftus and Tina Beattie. It rocks the boat. It makes - as the Holy Father might say - a mess. It complicates their careful plans. And, looking at the situation strategically, they may think that it is more important to seek after the lost sheep of liberal dissent, than the 99 sheep in the fold of orthodoxy. Especially as the dissidents seem to represent the wider culture - by being nice to them, they are opening the door to everyone outside the Church.

I should say right away that I completely understand the fear of conservative bishops that groups of conservative activists will make prudential mistakes, strategic blunders, and even theological errors. The Holy Ghost does not prevent good people seeking good things from being counter-productive. But the position of these conservative hierarchs is itself based on a number of prudential misjudgments. Let me list some.

1. If we are nice to the dissidents, we have some hope of saving them for the Church. By which they mean: allow the dissidents to keep their positions of prestige and influence, and make them feel valued. This is a mistake because this treatment simply reinforces the idea that dissident views are the new orthodoxy, both for the dissidents themselves, and for those who see them treated in this way.

2. If we sideline conservatives, they will at any rate stay in the Church and continue to support us. Wrong: Catholics who might be described as naturally conservative have joined the SSPX, become sede vacantists, or joined Evangelical Protestant churches; they have lapsed, they've taken to drink, and clerics have abandoned their vocations; in a talk of Michael Davies he mentions one he knew driven to suicide. They are deserving of pastoral concern just as much as other folk.

3. We can solve the problems behind the scenes more easily if conservative activists aren't making a fuss in public. This may sometimes be true, but it is hard to see how it could be in very many instances. If there is no fuss, then it is assumed there is no scandal. If there is no scandal, then it is assumed there is no problem. We can all think of examples of serious problems, well known to apparently conservative bishops, which were never publicised and - what do you know? - never addressed, sometimes for decades. The sex abuse scandals, of course, exemplify this.

4. These activists are out of control and poorly led. Sometimes: but if the conservatives in authority went to even a little trouble, they could gain the trust of the most important activists and exercise some guidance over them. This does indeed happen sometimes, but only when the bishops or officials throw off the attitude that error should not be publicly opposed, because without that they are not going to gain the trust of anyone.

5. Unity is more important than the purity of our orthodoxy. What those who say this actually mean is that any Catholics who still have the Faith should stop opposing attempts to teach a pack of lies to Catholic school children, trainee teachers, seminarians, and the Faithful. That may make for a quiet life, but it doesn't make for the unity for which Our Lord prayed.

6. By avoiding conflict, we keep doors open for dialogue. In practice, it is easier to have dialogue when people aren't pretending that they and others don't have the differences of opinion that they have. Basil Loftus sends out smoke signals that he's in favour of women priests: how can you have a meaningful discussion on that basis? If I pretended not to notice the smoke signals, the question of dialogue wouldn't even arise.

7. Evangalisation is about not scaring liberal non-Catholics away by talking about hard doctrines. I've addressed this before. To reiterate, evangelisation is, on the contrary, about offering something distinctive which non-Catholics don't already have.

The underlying misjudgment, in my view, is a failure to understand how much damage dissent does. The Faith is passed on, the life of grace is developed, nearly always in the context of institutions: the home, the school, the parish. This is logical because Catholic institutions manifest the community of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, in a tangible way, to us as individuals. These institutions can be turned into a nightmare of conflict, or just rendered completely useless, by a minority of dissidents, if they are given a free hand. I have in mind things like a few teachers who mock the Faith in the classroom, or parish busybodies who show no respect for the Blessed Sacrament. If they are left to get on with it, no one in the institution can take seriously the Catholic claims of those nominally in charge. It can no longer inculcate a Catholic culture, a Catholic perspective on the world, because it no longer manifests one. In a very short time, it is no longer a Catholic institution, though it may remain one where some Catholics work, or where some sacraments take place, which can have an effect on individuals as individuals. To repeat, this is not the unity for which Our Lord prayed.

In the destruction of these local, tangible institutions, as manifestations of the Mystical Body and as channels of grace, we see the destruction of the Catholic community. Those who have authority over these institutions have the obligation to exercise it for the common good - not just for the good, as they see it, of a few dissident intellectuals. Generally speaking, over the last half a century, they have not exercised this authority. When conservative activists talk about this, the get the sort of welcome which was extended to Elijah and Jeremiah.

This may start changing, but it is going to be very slow. Personally I admire these conservative activists, and I have made my own contribution to this work, such as in my posts on Mgr Loftus. I also acknowledge their limitations and mistakes - and my own, in this department. What I would say to them, and to their supporters, is that as well as criticising dissent, we need to start building things up from the grass roots in a positive way. I personally think that this has got to include a recovery of the ancient liturgy.

This is why tomorrow I will post about the Latin Mass Society's Priest Training Conference in Belmont Abbey, and from now until September my life is going to be dominated by a succession of devotional and educational events involving the traditional Mass. My readers may be less interested in these than they are about the latest episode of ecclesiastical politics, but, sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity, these events may have more effect on the future of the Church. And they will, at any rate, keep me sane.

Protect the Pope: double standards, Part 2

Bare-knuckle Catholics, immortalised in the Hardman stained glass of Belmont Abbey Church:

left to right, Bl Thomas Percy, martyred leader of the Northern Rising,

Bl John Beche, martyred Abbot of Gloucester, and

Bl Adrian Fortescue, martyred Knight of Malta.

Since the first post in this series Bishop Campbell has issued a press release explaining the reasons for his action. A key sentence is this:

It is my view that bishops, priests and deacons of the Church – ordained and ‘public’ persons – are free to express themselves and their personal views, but never in a way that divides the community of the Church i.e. through ad hominem and personal challenges.

The word 'personal' is italicised in the original, and the phrase is repeated later in the statement. It would seem that Bishop Campbell would be happy for Deacon Donnelly to write about the teaching of the Church, but not to name those who appear to dissent from this teachings, in order to raise questions about them or warn Catholics against them.

It is not for me to criticise Bishop Campbell's decision, and of course he is not Mgr Loftus' ordinary, so the contrast I have drawn between these cases does not imply any personal inconsistency for Bishop Campbell. I want, nevertheless, to understand the institutional culture which has tolerated Loftus' column for more than two decades, but exhibits such discomfort about blogs.

Deacon Donnelly's blog was bad, we're told: fine. But what about this newspaper column? In a newspaper with episcopal approval, sold in the back of churches. Do Loftus' columns not 'divide the church'? Do they not include 'ad hominem and personal challenges'?

When Loftus called, in a letter to the Tablet in June 2013, for 'anger' about a sermon preached by Bishop Mark Davies?

When he described Cardinal Ranjith, in November 2013, as 'the Sri Lankan cappa magna fetishist and Tridentine-rite devotee'?

Did it not 'divide the Church' and make use of 'caricaturing or stereotyping' (phrases used by Bishop Campbell) when Loftus described the Roman Curia as having a 'culture of ‘Vatican II-bashing’ in May 2012, and of 'Legalism in law, overly-literal interpretations of Scripture, rubrical straightjackets round the liturgy, fossilisation of what should be living doctrine, and general over-objectification of faith and morals' in June 2012?
 Examples could be multiplied. 

The suggestion of my last post was that, since it is perfectly obvious that no one could suggest that Protect the Pope was less orthodox, or less respectful of bishops and prelates, or more scornful and uncharitable towards its opponents, than Basil Loftus' column - and the same is true of all the other Catholic blogs worth mentioning - lack of orthodoxy and lack of respect for persons cannot be the reason for bishops' unease about blogs.

But my next claim, which is perhaps more shocking, is that I don't think it is necessarily a liberal conspiracy among bishops which led to Protect the Pope's closure. I don't think it shows that Bishop Campbell, or anyone else in the hierarchy who has expressed unease about blogs, like Cardinal Müller, are at heart sympathisers of the likes of Loftus.

Those who have been involved in Catholic activism over they years know the pattern of behaviour very well. Bishop X is attacked by dissidents, who support attacks on his public positions by the state and the secular media, who defy his commands, and who dissent from his teachings. Groups of loyal Catholics go on a counter-offensive: they make public responses defending the teaching of the Church in the media, they engage in hand-to-hand struggles with the dissidents in forums such as boards of school governors, they gather information which would make it possible for Bishop X to apply canonical penalties against the dissidents, if he wanted to. And you know what? It is the dissidents who have cosy chats over tea with Bishop X. They get appointed to jobs and committees. They get space in the diocesan newspaper and links from the website. The loyalists, on the other hand, are frozen out. This has happened again, and again, and again, most famously after the publication of Humanae Vitae, when Pope Paul VI refused to support bishops who disciplined dissenters.

What is going on? I shall identify three minor reasons, and one major one. Minor ones first.

'Leave it to us, chaps.' Many bishops, religious superiors, and people in the Curia who are basically rather conservative, and would like to steer things in the direction of sanity, find themselves involved in a very complicated game of chess with their opponents. The last thing they want is interventions from third parties, even if those parties are essentially on their side. Suppose that, say, conservative activists suddenly publicised the dissent of a liberal who for tactical reasons was helping to deal with an even worse liberal. The bishops are worried that anything they aren't in complete control of will make their lives more complicated, their jobs harder, and their prospects of success dimmer. 

'I don't know what effect they have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me.' The more conservative side of the discussion in the upper reaches of the hierarchy doesn't necessarily look like the more conservative side of the discussion on the blogs. Conservatives in the former may well have perfectly sincere misgivings about the views and tactics of the latter. They have, after all, spent a lifetime adapting themselves to liberals, whereas the orthodox crusaders have spent a lifetime trying to enthuse the troops about how bad things are. That doesn't mean that the more conservative bishops have lost the Faith, but they may well not only not want to distance themselves from the conservative activists, but, when possible, actually get them to shut up.

'Did I really say that?' What conservative Catholics tend to do is look for authoritative statements from Rome, or from local bishops, which show as clearly as possible that the words and actions of the dissidents are wrong. Making such statements is easy, however; enforcing them is hard work. Many essentially conservative prelates adopt softly-softly approaches to dealing with problems - say, removing a dissident from a sensitive post by offering him a more senior and better paid job elsewhere. The last thing the prelate wants to be reminded of in the midst of this kind of task are the less nuanced statements he or others have made: they have the potential to make him look, and perhaps feel, a fool. I mean heck, he's trying to deal with the problem, ok? Just let him get on with it.

But the biggest reason is this.

'Dissidents must be attracted with honey, not forced into open schism.' To adopt a political parallel, the conservatives are regarded as the core vote, and the dissenters as the people who could be lost, or won, depending on how cleverly and charmingly the bishop handles them. The parallel seems apt since the dissidents tend to have the support of the secular media, and this makes it look as though what pleases the dissidents pleases the whole non-Catholic world. If only, the bishop thinks, I can, without compromising on theological principles, but just by being nice, establish friendly relations with these dissidents, then I can draw not just them but to an extent the whole culture towards the Church's orbit, where of course they can be influenced in a positive way by all sorts of things. To condemn them would just force them into more extreme positions, more open opposition to the Church, and ultimately either into schism or lapsation. And that can't be good, can it?

The net result of this sort of reasoning is that, everywhere you look, conservatives are sidelined, and dissidents are made much of. Liberals who want conservative faithful to think they are on their side, when actually they aren't, can use these arguments to explain their lack of action. I am convinced, however, they are also used by those who are genuinely conservative in theology. 

But I am also convinced that the lines of reasoning I have outlined are wrongheaded. This I must explain in another post.

Protect the Pope: strange double standards. Part 1

High Mass at the LMS Priest Training Conference at Belmont Abbey: just to cheer us all up.

What has Deacon Nick Donnelly done which Loftus has not done? I haven't kept such close tabs on the Protect the Pope blog as I have on Loftus' Vatican Counsel column, but I challenge anyone to give examples of bad things which can compete with my examples of what Loftus has done.

Has he denied any Catholic doctrines? I don't think so, but Loftus has: the Resurrection of Our Lord, the Real Presence, the Inerrancy of Scripture, the Indissolubility of Marriage (at least indirectly), Original Sin (as the Church understands it), the impossibility of the Ordination of Women, and, on morality, the limitation of sex to marriage.

Has he sought to bring the Church's institutions in disrepute? I don't think so, but Loftus has: the Congregation for Divine Worship, the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, the Office of Papal Celebrations, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Curia as a whole, and the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Has he attacked prelates by name? Nick Donnelly has criticised some, or called for them to act, but Loftus has gone in for vitriolic personal abuse: Cardinal Nichols, Bishop Davies, Cardinal Ranjith, Cardinal Burke, Cardinal Müller. Not by name, but unmistakably: Archbishop Roach, Bishop Hugh Gilbert, and Mgr Marini, the Papal MC.

Has he undermined the discipline of the Church by intemperate attacks on binding decisions? I don't think so, but Loftus has: the new translation of the liturgy, the limitations placed on the use of General Absolution, and a vast number of provisions of liturgical law. And of course he has attacked clerical celibacy.

What is clear is that, despite this, the bishops are much more comfortable with Loftus than with bloggers like Nick Donnelly. On bloggers, we have had a whole series of signals of concern, including one from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Müller, to the Ordinariate, that they should 'exercise vigilance over blogs of their members'.

Hang on a minute: the clerical bloggers of the Ordinariate weren't attacking Müller, or the Curia; for the most part, they were defending them. Similarly, I don't think Bishop Campbell is a liberal who has more in common with Loftus than with Nick Donnelly: he is the man who has given one of the most stunning churches in the country to the Institute of Christ the King, and he can expect to be a target for Loftus' vitriol soon enough. What we are seeing is a deliberate policy, where conservative-leaning people in authority attack their friends and protect their enemies.

This is strange, but it is neither unprecedented nor incomprehensible. First, a little clue: it is the same policy that was applied by Pope Paul VI with regard to dissent over Humanae Vitae. I will explain more in another post.